History

The path to 101 Hymns may have been a bit different from other hymnals. It started as a personal project in 2024, when Kurt Hein, rector of Light of Christ church in Georgetown, Texas, introduced A Hymnal of the Heart (HotH) to me. What an interesting proposition, a hymnal without harmonies. I thought I would take up writing harmonies for the hymns just as a personal exercise. When I mentioned that to the Fr. Hein, he told me that they used the hymnal as the source of the hymns in the service, but that they wanted harmonies. They were trying to build up sources of harmonized versions of the hymns in pdf format that they could print in their weekly bulletin. And wouldn’t it be nice if there was a curated library of just that?

I decided that would be a worthy project. The church did not want “fresh” harmonies, but traditional harmonies that the congregation would recognize. That changed the nature of the project for me, but still, it would be nice to think that someone might use the fruits of my labour, so I set to work on finding public domain arrangements of the hymns, creating new engravings of each, and formatting into what is now 101 Hymns.

As I progressed through the work, I came across some hymns for which I could not find a public domain arrangement with which I was satisfied. For those hymns, I intended to publish as the original – melody only. My wife urged me not do publish this way. The point of the hymnal is to have harmonized versions of HotH, I should have harmonies for all of then. She also encouraged me to write my own arrangements for these cases. You may come to resent her for that. 🙂 I yielded. There were a couple hymns which, although satisfactory arrangements were available in the public domain, I used new arrangements of my own, on a whim. My plan was, for each hymn which used an obscure arrangement, or one I had written on my own, I would publish both the melody-only version as well as the harmonized version. More on that later.

I set a goal to complete the initial transcription into MuseScore before the end of 2024. I finished sometime between 11:00pm and 12:00pm on December 31, 2024.

At the start of the effort, I thought that the hard part was to put the text and notes of the hymns on the page. I was mistaken. I engraved all the hymns in MuseScore. Putting the content on the page does not turn out a finished product. There was a lot of work still to be done to format appropriately. The target being to format the hymns to fit on a 7 x 8 1/2 page, which is the size of many church bulletins (folded legal page).

Unfinished, the content was in a state that was at least as usable as many of the ratty copies being used by Light of Christ Church. However, the church had moved on from the idea by this point, so I dropped the project.

October 2026 it occurred to me that I had already done a great deal of work on this project, and I should probably finish the job. I decided to pivot from pdf printables for bulletins to a printed book.

I had not yet considered how to combine 101 individual hymns along with the related book matter (title page, index of titles, etc) into a format that could be printed as a book.

I could use MuseScore to compile all the parts together, but it is clunky, difficult, and lacks some of the control one might want in formatting a book. In the processes, I determined that as great as MuseScore is (and it really is great), there are some finishing touches I wanted to make that lead me to move the entire project from MuseScore to Dorico. Although I was able to do some of the heavy lifting by exporting MusicXML from MuseScore then importing to Dorico, the results were a bit disappointing. Every hymn required significant reformatting in Dorico.

And I still hadn’t figured out how to compile the content into a book.

Again I considered using Dorico to create the entire book, but took the advice of other creators to keep the hymns as individual files, and use layout software to compile the book.

At the beginning of September 2025 I settled on Affinity Publisher. Timing is everything.

A few days after I purchased Affinity Publisher, Apple released Mac OS Tahoe. I looked through all the major programs I used on my computer, none of them had any warnings or concerns about Tahoe, so i upgraded. Affinity Designer started crashing repeatedly. One of the things that caused a crash – adding any hymn that was more than a single page. This was pretty frustrating, but I felt confident that Affinity would offer a bug fix pretty soon. I was able to limp along by splitting all the multi-page hymns into multiple single-page files. This added a lot of extra work, but I was progressing. Then came the big scare – Affinity removed their software from all outlets, and shut down the community forum. You could no longer buy Affinity Designer, and things looked pretty grim. Next Affinity said that a big announcement would be coming in 6 weeks. But what was that announcement? The Affinity community, which was a very vibrant and loyal community, was aflame with rumors, speculation, and rage.

As for me, I was frustrated because I just paid for a product that became obnoxiously difficult to work with just after I bought it, and now, what? Were they going to discontinue the product entirely?

I stuck it out for the six weeks. Much to my surprise and happiness, Affinity did release a bug fix during that time that fixed some of the issues I was experiencing. At the end of October they made the big reveal – they were combining three Affinity products (Designer, Photo, and Publisher) into a single product, and it would be free!

Wow – is it a tiny bit disappointing that I spent a sizable chunk of money to buy the software eight weeks earlier, and it was only limping during most of the time I owned it? Sure. But it was a major relief to find that it was rising from the ashes, and I would be able to continue using it.

It was probably about now that I started looking into how to actually get the printing done. I don’t have a budget to work with, so Kindle Desktop Publishing (which my wife uses for publishing her cozy mystery series – affiliate link). Turns out KDP does not support a 7 x 8 1/2 book size.

Time to reformat every hymn again to match the 6 x 9 book size.

Eventually layout was finished, but I still had a copy editor going through the hymns for errors in the text. And boy were there a lot of them. In some cases, I was able to fix the spelling, or add the missing comma, or whatever, and all’s well. In other cases, the changes forced a single page hymn on to a second page, which meant reworking not only the formatting of the hymn, but the layout of the hymnal. In one instance, adding a single missing comma to the hymn forced the one pager onto a second page! There was even that one hymn for which I forgot to include the second page entirely. I’m sure the first edition will still have some errors, but a lot fewer of them than it would have been without the excellent copy editing that was done.

Back and forth between the copy editor and myself, we were pretty nearly finished getting the whole layout complete. Then I started questioning exactly why I was putting the melody-only versions of the hymns in at all. Discussion ensues with my closest confidants, and we agree that there is no benefit to having duplicated hymns. One can read the melody alone if one doesn’t want to use the harmonies. So here goes another round of major layout changes.

As I write this, I think I am pretty near the actual publication of the first edition. I would like to believe that I have gotten everything just right, but I expect that there are still a lot of improvements to be made. I would like to believe that churches from around the globe are soon to be over-running KDPs printing capabilities, while premium book printers vie for the opportunity to produce the hymnal with stunning bindings and the finest paper with gilt edges. But I’ll be happy if I sell enough copies to make my my hourly wage for the effort equal to minimum wage. Or to break even on my expenses for creating it. Or to think that someone is benefiting from the work I’ve done. In fact, I’ll be happy for having completed this task if I don’t sell a single copy. But not quite as happy.

If you are curious:

• Expenses:
  • Editing: $1000
  • Printing: $800 (I bought a printer capable of printing various page sizes to ensure my formatting was what I wanted it to be)
  • $150: Affinity Software Suite (Now just Affinity, and free)
  • ISBN: $5.75
  • To recoup, I need to sell about 530 softcover or 950 hardcover
• Labor:
  • 750 hours: $5437.50 at minimum wage (7.25/hr).
  • To recoup, I need to sell a little over a thousand books.
  • Let’s have fun – average hourly wage at McDonald’s in Austin Texas is $13.50, so at that rate my labor is worth $10,125.
• To recoup my expenses and pay myself
  • Minimum wage:
    • 2000 soft cover
    • 3500 hard cover
  • McDonald’s wage:
    • 3200 soft cover
    • 5700 hard cover